[WikiEN-l] Linking Dates

[Delirium]

Delirium wrote:
> Andrew Gray wrote:
>> The old "link all dates" is now deprecated, and we're advised to just
>> write them in a standard form (14 November 2000 or November 14, 2000).
>> It'll be interesting to see if this helps reduce overlinking
>>
>> The old system was laudable, but really only worked for a small
>> minority of readers, usually active editors themselves. For everyone
>> else, it just got confusing...
>
> The old system did, however, tend to reduce the number of tendentious 
> editors going around mass-changing date formats to their preferred 
> format, because such editors could just set their preferences and not 
> have the "wrong" format grate on them henceforth. Anecdotally, there's 
> been a big spike in the past few weeks of that sort of garbage editing.

Reviving this thread, that does appear to be taking place (contrary to 
some more optimistic predictions that it wouldn't). The biggest 
offenders seem to be people whose hackles are raised by what they 
perceive as "American provincialism", and who feel that an international 
encyclopedia "ought to use the international date format", rather than 
follow the usual Wikipedia dialect practice, where we accept all the 
major variants, and strongly discourage edits that change one to 
another, unless the article's strongly associated with a specific 
English-speaking country where one dialect predominates.

Previously, such folks could be accomodated by simply changing their 
date preferences, keeping them from ever having to see an odious 
Amerikkkan date, but now they're required to resort to a crusade to get 
rid of Americanist date formats, preferably entirely, or at least 
confine them to US-only articles. There's even some proposals to change 
the current MOS (which basically says don't change date formats unless 
it's a UK/US/Australian/etc. subject) to accomodate their views: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)/Proposal_on_international_date_format

-Mark